Eretz Israel is our unforgettable historic homeland...The Jews who will it shall achieve their State...And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.(Theodor Herzl, DerJudenstaat, 1896)

We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and development of the Middle East.(From Proclamation of the State of Israel, 5 Iyar 5708; 14 May 1948)With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America, Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations.... For the global jihad, Israel may be the first objective. But it will not be the last.(Friends of Israel Initiative)

Monday, 29 April 2019

Love her or loath her, it's hard to deny she's brave. British commentator Katie Hopkins, in her new documentary "Homelands", suggests a bleak future for the West's ostriches:

(Homelands: Our people searching for a new place to call home.
Katie Hopkins looks at Christian and Jewish communities being forced from their Homelands and asks where will they go.
This film is sponsored by ENF and Produced by Janice Atkinson MEP.)

Wednesday, 24 April 2019

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

President Trump appears set to expose more than forty years of
deceptive and misleading information disseminated by the United Nations
(UN) in relation to the boundaries of former Palestine.

This welcome development comes with President Trump’s Special U.S Envoy Jason D. Greenblatt telling Sky News in Arabic on 19 April:

“there is no reason to use the term ‘two-state solution,” the reason being that, “every side sees it differently.”

The UN must take responsibility for
creating such confusion by perpetuating intellectual and political fraud
originating with its 1978 publication: "The Origins and Evolution of the Palestinian Problem" (referred to below as the Study).

Part 1 of the Study covering 1917-1947 was trashed by Israel’s Ambassador to the UN – Yehuda Blum – on 16 November:

“Even the most
cursory reading of this document can leave no doubt that the means and
machinery of the United Nations have been misused once again to disseminate
highly selective and tendentious information under the guise, in this
instance, of what purports to be a scholarly study.The history of international conflicts, and particularly
those with complex historical origins, can only be properly written by
objective historians who enjoy complete academic freedom. The practice
of writing and rewriting history according to the transient interests of
a political body is, of course, characteristic of certain regimes. It
is regrettable that the United Nations has now been drawn into that
pattern.”

“At the end of the first part of the
publication, ostensibly dealing with the period of the Palestine
Mandate, there appear a number of maps. The one map that is
conspicuously absent is the official map of the Palestine Mandate which,
until 1946, included Transjordan on the east bank of the Jordan River.
This map was omitted because it does not fit into the PLO’s own scheme,
as it would show too clearly that a Palestinian Arab state has already
been in existence for 32 years on more than three quarters of the
territory of mandated Palestine – that is, the state now called Jordan.
That embarrassment is eliminated in this purportedly scholarly and
impartial publication by the simple expedient of eliminating the map.”

Blum was not finished – pointing out to the General Assembly on 20 December 1978 regardingPart 2of the Study, covering 1947-1977:

“Taken in conjunction with the first part, it
is clear that this pseudo-scientific “study” is designed to give
currency, under the emblem of the United Nations, to a completely
misleading version of the history of the Arab-Israel conflict.Put briefly, that version has it that the League of
Nations Mandate over Palestine was illegal, and all subsequent events,
including the establishment of the State of Israel, are null and void.
This wholly distorted view is set out in almost as many words in article
20 of the so-called PLO’s basic document, the “National Covenant”, and
it forms the underlying thesis of the United Nations Secretariat
publication in question. It completely ignores the Jewish people’s
inalienable rights to self-determination, national independence and
sovereignty in its homeland, the land of Israel.Thus, what purports to be a scholarly study, supported by
what appears to be a scientific apparatus, is no more than a crude
piece of propaganda.”

Two States exist in former Palestine
today: Arab Jordan – created in 1946 in about 78 per cent of former Palestine –
and Jewish Israel – created in 1948 in about 17 per cent of that territory.
These two states remain pivotal to ending the 100 years old Jewish-Arab
conflict.

Trump seems ready to set the UN fabricated record straight when his peace plan is released.(Author’s note: The cartoon—commissioned exclusively for this
article—is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost
political and social commentators—whose cartoons have graced the columns
of Israeli and international media publications for decades. His
cartoons can be viewed at Drybonesblog)

Monday, 22 April 2019

Venomous posts on social media from militant atheists, extreme leftists, anti-white racists and other usual suspects regarding the tragedy that was the burning of Paris's Notre Dame cathedral are as despicable as they are predictable. There have been posts from some Jews expressing a lack of sympathy with the French owing to the historic persecutory nature of Christendom towards Jews, but they have been few and far between, with most Jews sharing the general anguish at the terrible fate of this beautiful and iconic symbol of western civilisation.

After all, revolutionary and Napoleonic France was the first of the continental nations to grant Jews civil rights, that France's Jews amply repaid the favour, and that, for all the trauma of the past, Jews and Christians in France, as in western Europe, now face a common enemy.

100 years ago, shortly after the Treaty of Versailles, the new grand rabbin (chief rabbi) of France, Israel Levi, son-in-law of the famous grand rabbin Zadoc Kahn, and for many years grand rabbin of Paris, gave an interview to a representative of the London Jewish Chronicle (reprinted in the Sydney Hebrew Standard, 7 November 1919).

'You come to me', Levi told the reporter,

'when we have just celebrated our fête of victory, so that it is opportune for me to review that part which the Jews of France took in the great war. As you know, we have compulsory service, so that we naturally had large numbers of men serving from the outbreak of war, but the remarkable feature to note is that the number of Jewish officers was out of all proportion, and stiows the high standard of education attained by the French Jewish community. A very considerable number of Jews served in the Algerian regiments, which had a glorious record under fire....

The wide dissemination of the Jews among the various professional classes has been brought out by the special services held by various bodies in memory of those fallen in the war. Services have been held in the synagogues as well as in the Catholic and Protestant churches — a real union of the creeds. We never confined our prayers on these occasions for our own brethren, but for all without distinction. [Emphasis added here and below]

The war has hit French Jewry very hard. Many communities have ceased to exist because the towns in which they lived have been wiped out. Thus, the synagogue at Verdun was completely destroyed, and altogether ten places of worship met a like fate. The synagogue at Rheims was not altogether destroyed, but the inhabitants were compelled to leave. Several synagogues, including those in Rouen and Boulogne, were bombed from the air....

Our chaplains were selected in the first instance from those rabbis over military age, but if these proving insufficient, the authorities released a certain number of rabbis from the fighting ranks to serve as chaplains. Several of them fell on the field of battle, including the grand rabbin of Lyons [Abraham Bloch, Jewish chaplain attached to the

14th Army Corps], who, you may remember, was the hero of a very remarkable incident. A farmhouse [on Anozel Hill near Nancy], which was formerly used as a dressing station, came under shell fire, and the rabbi went about among the wounded reassuring them till their turn came to be removed. A poor fellow, who was dying, seeing a chaplain moving about, asked him for a. crucifix. The rabbi fetched one, and was holding it before the man's dving gaze, when he himself was killed. The incident created quite a sensation at the time and produced a profound impression in circles able to appreciate the line humanity of the rabbi's last service to his fellow-creatures....'

Levi continued:

'[A] very large proportion of French Jewry comes from [Alsace and Lorraine, held by Germany from 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919], and the Jews there, in common with so many Alsatians, retained feelings of the warmest affection for France and welcomed the return of the tricolor. Last December a solemn service was held in the synagogue at Strasbourg, which was attended by the President of the Republic [Raymond Poincaré], by M. [Georges] Clemenceau, Marshals Joffre, Foch, and Petain, and Generals Gouraud, Mangin, and Hirschauer. I may, perhaps, recall the words which M. Raymond Poincaré used in reply to an address of welcome on that occasion. He said: "I thank you for the welcome which you have been good enough to extend, in the name of the Jews of Alsace, to the representatives of the government of the Republic and the national representatives.

We know how faithfully the Jews of Alsace have remained to the mother country. I beg you to believe that France has never for one moment lost sight of them, and that it is not tolerance, to use your own expression, which she displays towards your community, but, indeed, a profound respect, which she has for your religious beliefs. The communities of the reconquered provinces expressed a, desire to join the Consistoire within a few days of the signing, of the armistice, and they will undoubtedly prove a source of strength."...' [Emphasis added]

Regarding the future of French Jewry, Levi was optimistic:

"I am pleased to say that during and since the war there has been not a single manifestation of antisemitism. Many feared that the war would bring about a recrudescence of Jew-hatred, but their fears have been falsified. I may say that at the be ginning of the war there were many foreign Jews in France — Russians, Poles, Rumanians, etc. — who voluntarily enlisted in the Foreign Legion, but there were also a considerable number who did not, but even this fact excited no anti-Jewish comment. On the other hand, the part played by the Jews in the defence of their country earned many encomiums in his quarters. I believe the French have learned by experience that antisemitism is a superficial prejudice, which has no solid grounds, and the new feeling of national unity has doubtless obliterated the old hatreds."

Furthermore:

"There has undoubtedly been a revival of religious feeling since the war, not only among those who have lost their dear ones, but generally. Our synagogues have been crowded and there are signs that this happy state of affairs will continue. On the other side of the picture is to be set the regrettable fact that there have been several mixed marriages between Jewish girls who have served as nurses in the hos pitals and their Christian patients or doctors. Still, the new era which peace has opened seems likely to be a fruitful one for French Jewry."

In 1938, the year a menorial to Bloch was erected, French cabinet minister César Campinchi unveiled a monument at Verdun commemorating Jewish soldiers who served in the French and Allied armies during the First World War, declared. To quote report in the Manchester Guardian (reprinted in the Sydney Hebrew Standard, 18 August 1938):

'Out of 190,000 Jews of France and Algeria 32,000 were mobilised and 6,500 killed; 12,000 foreign Jewish volunteers fought in the French Army and over 2,000 of them were killed.

"The French Revolution proclaimed that men must not be judged by the blood in their veins but considered as according to their mortal intellectual merits The Republic will never abandon this high principle. France does net hound men because their ancestors, were not born within her frontiers. We do not believe in establishing ridiculous hierarchies among ourselves. We do not hold that this or that people must be reduced to slavery or be destroyed. We believe that every human being has a right to live whatever his features or his colour. We do not believe in 'inferior' or ''despicable' races.

The ideal for .which, .together with their feilow-countrymen, so many Jews of France, England, and the. United States have died remains ours. We shall continue to hope that it will become the ideal of the whole world, for history is patient.' [Emphasis added]

The Vichy regime, of course, betrayed those Enlightenment-rooted idea of which Campinchi spoke, but they underlie the post-war emergence of a multicultural France, for good and, as we know in our generation, for ill.

'.... The two final deathblows to Christianity in Europe were the world wars. World War I ended most Westerners' belief in the nation-state and the West. Christianity, already weakened by the Enlightenment, was further weakened by World War I. German Christians were killing millions of French and English Christians, and French and English Christians were killing millions of German Christians. So the argument and sentiment against Christianity went. Then World War II saw even more death on the Christian continent as well as the failure of Catholic and Protestant churches in Nazi Germany to offer even minimal noncompliance with the Nazis' Jew-hatred.

With the end of World War II, every internal Western intellectual
doctrine was secular. G od, the Bible and religion were regarded at
best as innocuous nonsense and at worst as noxious nonsense.

Meanwhile, Europeans brought a non-European ideology into Europe, an
ideology that, for more than a thousand years, sought to replace
Christianity as the world's dominant religion. The Europeans, believing
in nothing distinctly Christian or Western and believing in the moral
and intellectual nonsense known as "multiculturalism" — a doctrine that
asserts that all cultures are morally equivalent — saw nothing
problematic in bringing millions of Muslims into Europe. They had no
idea that most of these people actually wanted to replace Christianity
with their religion. They had no idea because, in their ignorance and
arrogance, they assumed that because they were secular
multiculturalists, everybody else was, too — or would be, once they
lived in Europe.

They were wrong, of course. And as a result, the two dominant forces
in Europe — secular leftism and Islamism — sought the end of
Christianity and the West. (The left believes that protecting Western
civilization is equivalent to protecting white supremacy.)

This is not producing a pretty picture. Generally speaking, Islam has
not been nearly as kind, tolerant, open, medically or scientifically
innovative or intellectually curious as Western civilization (and yes,
Nazism and communism were born in the West, but they were anti-Western)....

European Christians persecuted European Jews, often brutally. But it
took a post-Christian ideology, secular Nazism, to produce Auschwitz —
just as it took post-Christian communism to produce the Gulag, the
Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Ukrainian and Cambodian genocides.

Moreover, Nazism and communism aside, the left's belief that secular
reason can replace G od and the Bible turns out to be completely wrong.
The alleged citadels of secular reason — the universities — are the most
irrational and morally confused institutions in the West.

I don't know if a worker accident or a radical Muslim set fire to
Notre Dame Cathedral (as they have scores of other churches around
Europe). In terms of what the fire represented, it doesn't much matter.
What matters is the omen: Europe is burning, just as Notre Dame was.'

Wednesday, 17 April 2019

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

In a closed-door meeting with members of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee King Abdullah of Jordan reportedly said the White House had
given him

“zero visibility into the most fraught part of their peace plan: how it proposes to divide Israeli and Palestinian territory.”

His Majesty – in complete denial – could not bring himself to call that territory “Judea Samaria and Gaza”

Abdullah
has seen Trump ditch the Palestine Liberation Organisation financially
and diplomatically over its continuing refusal to negotiate with Israel
on any Trump proposal to divide sovereignty in Judea and Samaria
between Jews and Arabs.

Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan laid out Jordan’s pivotal role in negotiating any such division in 1980:

“Israel
and Jordan are the two Palestinian states envisioned and authorized by
the United Nations. Jordan is now recognized in some 80% of the old
territory of Palestine. Israel and Jordan are the parties primarily
authorized to settle the future of the unallocated territories in
accordance with the principles of the mandate and the provisions of
Resolutions 242 and 338”

In 1982 duly-elected President Reagan
made it clear that peace could not be achieved by the formation of an
independent Palestinian state and the United States would not support
the establishment of such a state.

Reagan added:

“There
is, however, another way to peace. The final status of these lands
must, of course, be reached through the give-and-take of negotiations;
but it is the firm view of the United States that self-government by the
Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan
offers the best chance for a durable, just and lasting peace.”

Reagan concluded:

“When
the border is negotiated between Jordan and Israel, our view on the
extent to which Israel should be asked to give up territory will be
heavily affected by the extent of true peace and normalization and the
security arrangements offered in return.”

Abdullah’s father – King Hussein – did not take up Reagan’s invitation.

The
creation of an additional Arab State between Israel and Jordan –
favoured by President Bush, President Obama and ostensibly Kings Hussein
and Abdullah – is dead in the water following Benjamin Netanyahu’s
recent re-election as Israel’s Prime Minister for another four years.

Having recognised Israel’s sovereignty in the Golan Heights – Trump
could do likewise for those parts of Judea and Samaria coming under
Israeli sovereignty.

The circle will be completed for Netanyahu who told the United Nations on 11 December 1984:

“Clearly,
in Eastern and Western Palestine, there are only two peoples, the Arabs
and the Jews. Just as clearly, there are only two states in that area,
Jordan and Israel. The Arab State of Jordan, containing some three
million Arabs, does not allow a single Jew to live there. It also
contains 4/5 of the territory originally allocated by this body's
predecessor, the League of Nations, for the Jewish National Home. The
other State, Israel, has a population of over four million, of which one
sixth is Arab. It contains less than 1/5 of the territory originally
allocated to the Jews under the Mandate.... It cannot be said,
therefore, that the Arabs of Palestine are lacking a state of their own.
The demand for a second Palestinian Arab State in Western Palestine,
and a 22nd Arab State in the world, is merely the latest attempt to push
Israel back into the hopelessly vulnerable armistice lines of 1949.”

King Abdullah should not miss the opportunity his father rejected in 1982.

Zero visibility will disappear when King Abdullah opens his eyes.

(Author’s
note: The cartoon—commissioned exclusively for this article—is by
Yaakov Kirschen aka“Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and
social commentators—whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli
and international media publications for decades. His cartoons can be
viewed at Drybonesblog)

'Palestinian political researcher Sheikh Ahmad Al-Khatwani said in an address he delivered at the Al Aqsa Mosque that Istanbul had been conquered just like the Prophet Muhammad had predicted, and that Rome will also be conquered according to Muhammad's predictions. Al-Khatwani said that Muslims do not hate non-Muslims; rather, he said that all Muslims do "break down the physical obstacles" that prevent the "hateful infidels" from being brought into the light of Islam. He said that Islam is a religion for all of mankind and that the "physical obstacles" will be broken down by "a huge Muslim army that will wage Jihad for the sake of Allah." The video of the address was uploaded to the Internet on March 31, 2019.'

Sunday, 14 April 2019

The (left-dominated, politically correct) Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV; formerly the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies), the roof body representing organised Jewish communal life in the Australian state of Victoria,has issued an abject apology to the Jewish gay rights lobby group Aleph, regarding the latter's failure to be admitted to membership two decades ago:

"Aleph Melbourne submitted a valid application for membership of the JCCV in January 1999. The Executive of the JCCV supported admission of Aleph Melbourne as a member. On 10 May 1999 the JCCV Plenum debated the motion and voted (39 votes in favour and 46 votes against) to deny the application for membership

In the course of the debate, homophobic views were expressed by some delegates which caused long-term harm to members of our LGBTIQ+ community.

Accordingly, this Plenum now apologises unconditionally to all members of our community who were impacted by the rejection of the membership application and for the unacceptable homophobic views expressed during the debate.

We apologise for the deep offence and humiliation caused by the hateful words spoken in the course of the debate. We apologise for the subsequent distress, further marginalisation and stigmatisation caused by the rejection of Aleph Melbourne’s membership application. We now recommit ourselves to welcoming and embracing LGBTIQ+ Jews in all our work, as part of our broader commitment to social inclusion for all members of the Jewish community of Victoria. Through our genuine commitment to equality and diversity we seek to ensure that the mistakes of the past will not be repeated."

Among those resolutely opposing the admission of Aleph to the JCCV in 1999, mindful of such passages as Leviticus 18:22, was a prominent mainstream Orthodox rabbi in Melbourne, Ronald Lubofsky, well-known and well-remembered in circles promoting Jewish-Christian understanding. As he afterwards explained on ABC (Australia's equivalent of the BBC) radio:

"The core of the philosophy, the religious philosophy, the political philosophy of being Jewish, is in the written word. The Christians call it the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures. Some would reduce it to the Ten Commandments etc. and that excludes the notion of homosexuality, and as a consequence it’s a contradiction in terms. You simply cannot consider the two ideals as being compatible. So true enough, the members of this group are Jewish and it may well be that they are secular in their intent, but I’m afraid that as a group, as an organisation, they cannot claim parity as individuals absolutely. This is a point which I and others have made, that Jewish gay people, lesbian people, they can join synagogues, they can join the organisations which are represented under the umbrella of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, they can be the presidents of those organisations, but as an organisation, as an ideology, they’re not compatible....

These are individuals who do not produce families, these are individuals who perform sexually in a way which is aberrant, to say the least, with regard to Judaism. It is something which runs counter to the fundamentals of Judaism, that is the family unit..."

This is not unlike Cardinal George Pell's attitude towards homosexuals, to judge by what the cardinal told a reporter:

'How was he to know if someone was gay or not? If someone came before him in Mass with cupped hands of course he would give the bread and wine. He was hardly going to quiz each parishioner.

But if someone came before him in a rainbow sash — as the gay parishioners had — in what he saw as an open act of rebellion against the church, then he was duty bound as a servant of the church to defend its honour.'

As we all know, Cardinal Pell, who is not in good health, has since been convicted of sexually abusing two choirboys in a busy cathedral after Mass 22 years ago, and languishes in a prison cell awaiting the outcome of an Appeal in June against his sentence of six years' imprisonment with no possibility of parole for three years and eight months. A day of prayer for him scheduled by one Melbourne Catholic institution
for Saturday, 9 March, was cancelled owing to an outcry. He's in solitary confinement, for his own protection apparently, is permitted no sacramental wine and no breviary, although he does have his rosary. He's permitted only one visitor a week, few books, and gets to leave his cell for just one hour each day.

What a victory his fate is for visceral haters of the Catholic Church, for whom the theologically conservative Pell has long been, in his own words (in the course of his interview here
with columnist Andrew Bolt) "a hate figure", and
which has ensured a "lynch-mob mentality" towards him that included, among an avalanche of prejudicial press items (here's a taster), intemperate comments (taster here), an acclaimed obscene portrait of him and a much-publicised spiteful song, and which now sees Open
Season on Australian Catholicism itself in full swing: see, for example, here.

Many of those ebullient at Pell's downfull undoubtedly see the Church as a relic of the
pre-Enlightenment era. Yet, it must be asked, how "enlightened" is it
for a court of law to find a person guilty and deprive him of his
liberty and his reputation on the testimony of a single
plaintiff, uncorroborated by forensic evidence.

Does
not this have grievous implications for all Australians who find
themselves defendants, not just Pell? The cardinal has not been proven
guilty
beyond all reasonable doubt. The "guilty" verdict is unsafe. No wonder
that many people are comparing his case to that of the famously wronged Alfred Dreyfus, as well as to such proven miscarriages of Australian justice as the Lindy Chamberlain and Josephine Greensill jailings.

"[T]he boy from Ballarat with the film-star looks."

In its blurb, that's how Dublin-born lapsed Catholic ABC journalist Louise Milligan's much-hyped book The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Pell,
now triumphantly reissued with an update following his controversial 11 December 2018 conviction on historic sex abuse charges, describes the big imposing former Australian Rules ruckman (pictured left in his forties).

Not a prince of the church, not a cardinal, but a man convicted of and sentenced for terrible crimes against children.

A man who once flew first class will celebrate his 78th birthday in prison, and at the very least, his 79th, 80th and 81st....

We saw a man in a beige jacket and black shirt who seemed to have aged years in a matter of weeks....

Here was the man who dined with prime ministers, who went into battle in the culture wars, who cast an enormous shadow over the Catholic Church and Australian culture life.

He spent his days telling the rest of us how we ought to live our lives, and now, here he was, scratching out his signature on the sex offender register.

He could be on that register for life...."

In 2015 Pell's successor as Sydney's Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Fisher, identified the reasons for the "unfair"targeting of the cardinal:

“For
so long he was the most prominent churchman in Australia, so people
assume he’s in charge of everything and has been since birth,” he said,
noting that Pell was never the bishop in Ballarat and had no direct
responsibility for [convicted paedophile Gerald] Ridsdale or other
priests in the diocese.“Add to that a lot of people didn’t like him for
the very strong conservative stand he took on a number of issues, and
they would be happy to see him humbled,” Fisher said.

From a vile longstanding anti-Pell Facebook page

Fisher said there’s also a personal edge to the anti-Pell sentiment.

“Probably,
some people too are looking for public contrition. They think George
looks too self-confident or too gruff, too defiant. There’s a kind of
Aussie male macho element about his whole demeanor they don’t like,” he
said.

“They’d like
to see him crying, they’d like to see him blush … they’d like to see him
in some way looking hurt,” Fisher said. “Maybe they’re thinking that by
putting him through this again, he’ll finally crack.”

Noting
that Pell has responded to most of these charges several times before,
Fisher said the experience of having to do it again seems to be taking a
toll.

“People think
he’s indestructible, but I’ve sensed seeing him this time that it’s
getting to him,” he said. “It just goes on and on. No matter how many
inquiries there are it just keeps coming back, and it gets a bit more
vicious each time.”

Even before Pell's trial doubts were being expressed that he could ever expect a fair one. In the conservative Quadrant magazine (3 July 2017) David Flint, an emeritus professor of law, wrote inter alia:

'Without in any way debating his guilt or innocence, like every Australian, Cardinal George Pell is entitled to a fair trial.

If
he is denied this, will this be because of the leaks to the media about
the police investigation, will it be the failure of the Victorian
government to take serious action against this, or will it be because of
those in the media who have engaged in character assassination?

Australians
may well wonder why the announcement that the police had finally
decided to make charges was made by a deputy and not Victoria’s Chief
Commissioner Graeme Aston. Was it because he had, in one of his
conversations about the case in the media, described the complainants
as ”victims”? Did the police believe that by using his deputy his
apparent pre-judgement of the case was somehow extinguished from the
minds of potential jurors?

....
Pell was undoubtedly the pioneer here in dealing with institutional sex
abuse. He subsequently cooperated fully with the Royal Commission.
Recalled in 2015, the hearing was delayed by curious attempts to force
him to fly to Melbourne even when it was revealed his doctors warned
that the long flight could be fatal.

Just
before he was to appear, the world’s media were filled with well-timed
leaks revealing a police investigation about which even the Cardinal had
not been informed....

In the meantime, the Royal Commission video
examination was extraordinarily long and unnecessarily hostile....'

(See alsothis refutationof misrepresentations regarding the cardinal and the Commission)

In a speech in Hobart in 2017 believing Catholic-turned-agnostic Dr Gerard Henderson, director of the Sydney Institute, made, inter alia, these salient points:

"In its wisdom, the Royal Commission decided not to conduct hearings into institutional responses by the Australian media to instances of child sexual abuse.... The Royal Commission also did not hold hearings with respect to Islamic institutions or government schools.

While the Royal Commission chose not to conduct hearings into the ABC or Islamic institutions or government schools, it focused overwhelmingly on the Catholic Church in general and Cardinal George Pell in particular. This was lapped up by sections of the Australian media—particularly the ABC, Fairfax Media (mainly the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald), the Saturday Paper, the Guardian Australia, Channel 9’s 60 Minutes, Channel 10’s The Project and Sky News’s Paul Murray Live and Hinch Live (the latter program is no longer extant).

While all these media outlets employ objective journalists, it is true that some contain a high proportion of alienated ex-Catholics along with Catholics who disagree with the social conservatism of George Pell. Then there are the atheists, many of a sneering disposition, who resent believers—particularly Christians. In short, sections of the media have used the Royal Commission’s obsession with Catholicism to run campaigns against the Catholic Church....

The Christian tradition today faces two fundamental challenges—from militant Islamists who want to kill Christians and place the so-called Islamic State’s black flag on the Vatican; and from intolerant atheists who hold believers in contempt, particularly Christians, and wish to restrict their freedom of expression and action."

'Let’s be clear: he’s guilty, as he’s admitted, of not being aware of the
abuses by priests under his charge. That’s a serious ministerial lapse ... Yet, somehow, I
doubt the anti-Pell crowd is up in arms because he’s an inadequate
prelate. One suspects they’re not concerned about a marked aloofness in
the Catholic hierarchy. Indeed, as [Julia] Yost points out, Archbishop Frank
Little – Pell’s superior when the abuses took place – is known to have
actively covered up abuses. Is it worth noting that Little was a
progressive, and Pell’s a conservative? Julia Yost makes that transparently clear in [her] First Things critique of ABC operative Louise Milligan’s recent hatchet job.'

Distinguished Catholic scholar Dr George
Weigel who happens to be a founder member of the Friends of Israel
initiative (part of what he says about Israel has long featured on this
blog's sidebar, and the rest can be read here) has known George Pell for 50 years. (See here too.) He characterises the Pell imbroglio as "this generation's Dreyfus Case". There are very many, and not all within the Catholic Church, who share that view.

"Look, I know I'm innocent," Weigel quoted the cardinal, on the eve of his sentencing in March, as telling him, "The only judgement I fear is the Last Judgement."

Added Weigel: "This whole thing had weirdness about it from the get-go ... who put the Victorian police up to this?" (Update: see also Weigel's fine Easter article here)

Here's John Macaulay, a prominent Sydney Catholic and conservative, explaining why the cardinal's prosecution and conviction is "extraordinary beyond belief":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=ht7cWkd-KF4

Phillip Breene, writing in The Spectator on 9 March this year ("Prosecuting Pell: Can public hate figures get a fair trial?") observed:

"The important question is not simply whether the verdict in this case
is sound but whether a responsible public Prosecutor should have brought
the charges...

This is the difficulty with trials in which
the defendant is a controversial public figure and has been demonised
among the population from which the jury is drawn."

And here's Pell's biographer Tess Livingstone (behind a paywall, I'm afraid) giving her take on the conviction:

'....The guilty verdict was
delivered in December by a unanimous jury, in a properly constituted
court, after an earlier jury was dismissed on September 20 because it
split 10-2 in Pell’s favour. Hence the second trial, in which many
people, whether they like or loathe Pell and all he stands for, believe
went badly wrong.

If so, the jury were
not the only ones to get it wrong, nor the most culpable. Hard questions
need to be asked about police and judicial processes, including how and
why certain allegations ever made it to court, let alone to trial.

During
the first trial, observers in the gallery claimed: “Even if he didn’t
do it he deserves to be punished. He was in charge of the whole show’’.
How much did such sentiments influence the verdicts, if at all?
Australian justice cannot sink so low.

Studied
closely, the five convictions of child sexual abuse are grotesque,
implausible and break the bounds of credulity. In religious terms, they
would be grave sacrileges....

It
is extremely unfortunate, some of Pell’s friends believe, that the two
juries hearing the case were taken around the cathedral on a quiet
weekday when it is usually all but deserted, rather than having the
chance to see its hustle and bustle on Sunday mornings....

According to the
evidence, Pell was fully vested when he committed the crimes of which he
was found guilty. Over his trousers and shirt, he wore an alb — a long,
straight white garment, extending from shoulder to the floor, with no
openings and no splits at the front or sides that would have allowed the
garment to be moved aside, as alleged. Over the alb, Pell wore a
cincture — a thick cord tied several times around his waist, and over
that a heavy chasuble (the outer robe). Those garments, worn by every
priest at Mass, have spiritual significance. The choir boys were also
vested in robes over their shirts and trousers. [This video explains such vestments.]

It's an ill wind that blows nobody good

The
timing was odd for another reason. The scandal of clerical abuse was a
major issue in the news in late 1996 in Melbourne after the inglorious
legacy of Pell’s predecessor, Archbishop Frank Little. Pell had launched
the Melbourne Response in October 1996, a system to deal with the
problem led by an independent QC and the first of its kind for the
Catholic Church in the world. In that atmosphere, the notion of Pell
committing grotesque offences in a semipublic place with an open door (a
point not disputed by the prosecution) at a busy time defies logic.

During
the committal hearing, [magistrate] Ms Wallington dismissed even more grotesque
charges against Pell, dating back decades before 1996 to provincial
Victoria. As [Pell's lawyer] Richter said in his summing up in the Committal hearing,
one charge that was subsequently dismissed owed “more to the watching of
Satanist movies’’.

It was extreme,
violent and satanic, lending weight to the view that Pell has been the
victim of a vile stitch up. If so, it needs to be uncovered. In the
committal hearing, Richter said had the police made proper
investigations (as the defence did) they would have discovered no
evidence that Pell was ever at the institution where the alleged Satanic
incident occurred....'

(Curiouser and curiouser: see here) Any serious student of the Pell imbroglio should also read this article by veteran award-winning Australian crime writer John Silvester. Inter alia:

"Pell was found guilty beyond
reasonable doubt on the uncorroborated evidence of one witness, without
forensic evidence, a pattern of behaviour or a confession.

It is a matter of public record that it is rare to run a case on the word of one witness, let alone gain a conviction....

Pell
has become a lightning rod in the worldwide storm of anger at a
systemic cover-up of priestly abuses. But that doesn't make him a child
molester. If Pell did molest those two teenagers in the busy cathedral, it certainly does not fit the usual pattern of paedophile priests....

He could not have known if one of them was
not the son of the chief commissioner, the premier or the chief justice
who were waiting outside to collect them. He could not have known
if one of them would walk straight out and blow the whistle on him, and
with two kids in the room he would have been sunk...."

In this month's issue of the conservative political and intellectual magazine Quadrant, the front cover of which bears the unequivocal headline "The Persecution of George Pell", former Anglican priest Peter Wales puts it this way:

"... If
you wanted to invent a perfect nemesis for Australia's left-wing media,
you could not do better than to come up with an intelligent,
energetic, tough-minded, Australian-rules-playing, politically and
religiously conservative straight white male.

The ABC’s almost psychotic obsession with finding something dreadful
to report about Cardinal Pell was noted at least as long ago as 2015,
when Gerard Henderson suggested the mainstream media had the wrong
target, and was focussing on Pell simply because he is a social
conservative....' (See another pertinent Peter Wales article here)

'The
current heroine of the news media pursuing this story is Louise
Milligan, who has a best-seller with her book Cardinal, and her own
special reports on ABC television’s 7.30 and Four Corners programs. The
latest edition of her book lists the number of awards this work has won
her: the Walkley Book Award, two Quill awards from the Melbourne Press
Club, the Sir Owen Dixon Chambers Law Reporter of the Year award, the
Civic Choice award in the Melbourne Prize for Literature. The new
edition also carries accolades from an impressive array of left-wing
journalists and authors: Annabel Crabb, David Marr, David Armstrong,
Peter Fitzsimons, Kate McClymont, Quentin Dempster, Michaela Bond,
Derryn Hinch, Yvonne Rance, Gerard Windsor and Anton Rose, plus a
foreword by novelist/historian Tom Keneally who says Pell got what he
deserved because he was “a notable neo-conservative”, who “had
questioned climate change” and “has raised only muted opposition to the
federal government’s heinous asylum seeker policy”....'

Windschuttle places great significance on a case in Philadelphia
dating to 1998, involving a boy referred to as "Billy".

'The Philadelphia case was written up in Rolling Stone in
September 2011, well before Victoria’s police began what they called
their “trawling operation” against George Pell, hoping to find someone
to testify against him....

The
only difference between the American and Australian evidence was the
account of a second alleged meeting, which the boys said took place “a
few months later” in Philadelphia and “a month or so later” in
Melbourne. In the American version, it was a different priest involved
this time, who led the same boy to the sacristy, told him to undress and
then fellated him. In the Australian version, Pell allegedly found the
boy in the back corridor of the cathedral, forced him up against a wall
and fondled his genitals.

Nonetheless,
the two accounts are so close to being identical that the likelihood of
the Australian version being original is most implausible. There are
far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by
coincidence. The conclusion is unavoidable:

“The
Kid” [Louise Milligan's term for the still anonymous Australian
testifier] was repeating a story he had found in a magazine – or
repeating a story someone else had found for him in the media – thereby
deriving his account of what Pell did from evidence given in a trial in
the United States four years earlier. In short, the testimony that
convicted George Pell was a sham. This does not mean the accuser was
deliberately making it up. He might have come to persuade himself the
events actually happened, or some therapist might have helped him
“recover” his memory. But no matter how sincere the accuser’s beliefs
were, that does not make them true, especially when there is so much
other evidence against them.

There
is little doubt that if members of the jury in Pell’s case had been
informed of the surprising similarities between the two versions, some
of them must have had serious questions about their witness’s veracity.
The result would have been either a second hung jury or a not guilty
verdict....'

Surely this not too dissimilar allegation, about the late Rabbi Lubofsky, might not, unwittingly, have been grist to the anti-Pell mill. It appears to have first surfaced publicly several years ago, when it was referred to on the Facebook page of a well-known victim of paedophilia turned victims' advocate, though without mention of names:

It was, incidentally, repeated on high-profile Aleph activist mikeybear's blog in this form in January 2018:

"It was alleged by two men in 2012 that the late Rabbi Emeritus Ronald Lubofsky AM [Member of the Order of Australia] of St. Kilda Synagogue masturbated in front of them during their bar mitzvah lessons in the 1970s and 1980s. These men would have been 12 or 13 years old boys at the time. So far neither of the men have gone public with the details of the sexual abuse."

"What do Cardinal George Pell and Rabbi Ronald Lubofsky have in common?

What
do Rabbi Emeritus Ronald Lubofsky AM and His Eminence Cardinal George
Pell AC [Companion of the Order of Australia] have in common?

Both appointed to the Order of Australia.

Both revered in their religious circles.

Both vehemently opposed to homosexuality and sexual immorality.

Both sexually abused / predated on young boys."

Rabbi Lubofsky, by the way, died in 2000.

It's not necessary to be convinced of Pell's innocence to deplore his conviction. The conviction is "unsafe" and that's enough to believe it should be set aside. To quote Michael Warren Davis again:

"Pell’s cause is an unpopular one, to say the least. Our taste-makers
decided to destroy this man long ago. But, if his conviction goes
uncontested, who will be next? Who else will be condemned in the eyes of
law without forensic evidence or corroborating witnesses? Who else will
be imprisoned because he fails to conform to fashionable opinion? Me,
perhaps. Or you. Mark my words: if the third-most senior prelate in the
Roman Catholic Church isn’t safe, we don’t stand a chance. This, in my
opinion, is a fight for Australians’ basic civil liberties. I personally
believe that, if Cardinal Pell’s conviction isn’t overturned, we’ve
already lost."

Saturday, 13 April 2019

She was hoping to get back into the thick of Aussie federal politics, former UNRWA lawyer and unreformed Israel-hater Melissa Parke, who when representing (2007-16) the safe Labor seat of Fremantle, Western Australia, was a junior minister in the latter stages of Kevin Rudd's government, swept from power in 2013.

In selecting the glamorous blonde to run against conservative Celia Hammond in the normally safe Liberal WA seat of Curtin, relinquished by glamorous blonde Liberal former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Labor bigwigs evidently thought her high profile meant Ms Parke had a fighting chance of wresting the seat away from the less stellar Liberal hopeful.

But it's all gone awry for Parke and her backers, because she's now quit as a candidate in order to save her embarrassed party the "distraction" caused by her loathsome antisemitic slurs on Israel, scathingly compared in today's Melbourne Herald Sun by political commentator James Campbell as "actually manag[ing] to say something new" in the "long history of slanders" of the Jewish people.

A proponent of BDS in its economic and cultural guises, who in 2017 was one of about 60 prominent Australians(including APAN's president, ex-Bishop Browning) publicly opposed to Bibi Netanyahu's visit to Australia, Parke last month told the launch of WA Labor Friends of Palestine (to quote a report in WA Today) that

'Australia should recognise a Palestinian state and likened Israel's
settlements to China's island building activity in the South China Sea.

She
also took aim at Israel's influence in Australian politics and said
there was no doubt Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, while illegal
under international law, were "a reaction to and a consequence of
decades of brutal occupation".

Ms Parke, a former lawyer for the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Gaza,
said Australia had to break away from its "strategic dependence" on the
United States and recognise Palestine as a state, which is contrary to
Labor policy.

"There are already 137 nations that recognise the state of Palestine, that is more than 70 per cent of the world," she said.

"And, inshallah [Arabic for 'God willing'], Australia will join that consensus once we have a Federal Labor government.

An APAN illiterate has his say

"It's
also time finally for Australia to support an end to the brutal
occupation of Palestine and for the right of return of the Palestinian
refugees."

In her
speech to Palestinian supporters, which was held in the Perth offices
of the United Voice union, Ms Parke said the discrimination experienced
by Palestinians in Israel was because of a "fully fledged system of
Apartheid"....

"A false narrative sold to the western world is that Israel is a beacon of western democracy and human rights."

Ms Parke said Israel "propagates the myth that it is a small country that just wants to live in peace".'

Moreover,

'WAtoday also revealed earlier this week WA Labor senator and
Senate Deputy President Sue Lines told the same meeting of
pro-Palestinian activists that a powerful "Israel lobby" had been
influencing her party's policy on Palestine and peace in the Middle
East.

Senator Lines said policy in the area had stalled
because "the Israeli lobby is so powerful within the party and outside
of the party".'

The report quotes Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin as follows:

'He
said Ms Parke had the "inglorious distinction" of being the first, and
only, Labor MP to publicly endorse the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
(BDS) campaign, which seeks to force Israel to withdraw from occupied or
contested territories and aims at "the complete and total isolation of
the state of Israel and to dismantle the national home of the Jewish
people".

"BDS was rightly condemned as a form of antisemitism by
Julie Bishop, who Ms Parke is now seeking to replace as the federal
member for Curtin," Mr Ryvchin said."BDS has also expressly been repudiated by the Australian Labor Party and rejected as national policy even by the Greens."It
is regrettable that such an extreme and divisive figure should receive
the endorsement of the Australian Labor Party, particularly at a time
when it is vital to strengthen the political centre and diminish the
appeal of low populism and false and polarising rhetoric."

"One case I remember vividly, a pregnant refugee woman was ordered at a checkpoint in Gaza to drink a bottle of bleach," she said.

"It burnt out all her throat and insides. Fortunately her baby was saved.

"Another refugee was forced to put her baby through the X-ray machine."

It is that vile canard in particular that disgusts the Herald-Sun's James Campbell, who pointedly observed that another Labor candidate, Josh Wilson, was at the meeting addressed by Parke and did not take issue with her remarks.

Campbell adds that while current federal Labor leader Bill Shorten is committed to friendship with Israel, the fears of pro-Israel Australians that, post-Shorten, the party (remember the lurking presence of Bob Carr and cobbers?) might fall into the hands of a Corbynista-type leadership remains a realistic prospect.

Friday, 12 April 2019

Last year Philadelphia-born Mufti Muhammad Ibn Muneer told his faithful:

'that a martyr killed fighting for Allah holds the highest status of martyrdom, and that Muslims should never apologize for speaking the truth about Jihad, the Jews, and the Christians. Ibn Muneer explained that while there are different types of martyrs in Islam, one should not confuse any of them with the martyr who was killed in battle, who holds the highest status of martyrdom. He warned the audience not to treat lesser forms of Jihad, such as seeking knowledge and giving da'wa, as if they are equal to fighting for the sake of Allah.

Ibn Muneer said that when a Muslim makes a comment about Christians or Jews, such as saying that the Jews have earned Allah's wrath, he may face repercussions such as being called an extremist or terrorist. He explained that some people might say that videos on those topics should be taken down or made private, but that there is no need to apologize for the truth, and he asked: "What's next?... When does it stop, the neutering of the Muslim?" He also said that trying to remove Jihad from the Quran and the Sunnah is like "removing sweetness from honey." He added: "Your feelings have no value [or] worth in light of the Quran and Sunnah. If you don't believe and understand that, then maybe Islam is not the religion for you."...' [Emphasis added]

Here he is again. last year and this, telling his faithful how to deal with Jews and "kuffars".

To quote the uploader, Memri.org:

'In a Q&A session uploaded to the Hadith Disciple YouTube channel on January 31, 2018, New York cleric Mufti Muhammad Ibn Muneer said that there are different ways of dealing with different types of Jews.

He cited the Islamic principle of Al-Bara Wal-Wala (disavowal and loyalty), which he says is, as "explained by Ibn Al-Qayyim and many others... simply summed up as loving the Muslims and hating the non-Muslims... Buddhist, Hindu, this, that, so on and so forth."

He underlined that if his Jewish neighbor is "trying to do me physical harm... I have the right to defend myself."

He continued: "Look at history" when Jews and Muslims lived together and "the Muslims ran the country [and] the Jews were the minority.... The moment there is oppression" – that's "a whole different story."

In a Q&A session uploaded a year later, on January 31, 2019, he expanded on the subject, saying that a Muslim cannot maintain a close relationship with infidels with whom he had been friends prior to accepting Islam and that Muslims cannot treat non-Muslim as friends.

They may be treated with respect and friendliness in order to invite them to Islam, he said, but only a pious Muslim is worthy of a close, trusting friendship.

He added that it may be Islamically impermissible to wear soccer jerseys that have the names of non-Muslims or that contain symbols of something other than Islam, and that buying designer clothing might be supporting homosexuals or people who are bombing Muslims in Palestine.' [Emphasis added]

Thursday, 11 April 2019

That Jews can be identified by a characteristic unpleasant odour was an integral part of medieval antisemitism, mentioned, for example, in historian Joshua Trachtenberg's The Devil and the Jews (1943).

'Tunisian actor Walid Nahdi said in an April 4, 2019 broadcast on Radio Med (Tunisia) that he would not go to Israel if given an opportunity to do so, and that he cannot tolerate the Jews and their "distinct odor".

He said that he also does not feel comfortable around and cannot stand homosexuals. Tunisian actress Manal Abdul Qawi, who was also on the show, rebuked Nahdi and defended Jews, saying that Tunisian Jews love Tunisia more than many non-Jews do.

She also said that homosexuality is a private matter. Abdul Qawi added that she accepts all races and religions and that she values personal freedom.

Yamina Thabet, the head of the Tunisian Association for Support of Minorities (see MEMRI TV Clip No. 7063), has filed a legal complaint against Walid Nahdi following his comments.

This excerpt was not posted by Radio Med to their social media accounts; rather, it was uploaded to the Internet by other Tunisian accounts.'

Monday, 8 April 2019

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

King Abdullah seems increasingly hell-bent on ending 99 years of Hashemite-dynasty rule in Jordan.

This possibility is emerging as Abdullah is:

Seemingly refusing to commit to negotiating with Israel on President
Trump’s soon-to-be-released deal of the century to end the Jewish-Arab
conflict and

Taking active steps to place the Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty in jeopardy.

Transjordan (renamed Jordan in 1950) has always been the key to
resolving competing territorial claims by both Arabs and Jews in former
Palestine.

Transjordan comprised 78 per cent of the territory placed under the League of
Nations Mandate for Palestine after being wrested from 400 years of
Ottoman Empire sovereignty during World War One.

Mandatory Palestine was
designated in April 1920 by the Principal Allied Powers at the San Remo
Conference and in August 1920 by article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres as
the location for reconstitution of the ancient and biblical homeland of
the Jewish people.

Transjordan’s first Hashemite ruler – Abdullah I – arrived there in November 1920.

Abdullah was en route by train from Hijaz to Syria with armed forces
to assist his brother Feisal in his struggle with France to retain power
in Syria. Winston Churchill – at France’s request – offered Abdullah an
Emirate in Transjordan – which Abdullah gratefully accepted on 11 April 1921.

Feisal was removed from Syria by the French and installed as ruler of
Iraq under the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty dated 10 October 1922. France became
the Mandatory for the territory comprised in the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

These British-Franco machinations cost the Jewish people dearly, when the Mandate for Palestine – adopted unanimously by all 51 members
of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922 – denied the Jewish people the
right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in any part of
Transjordan (Eastern Palestine) and restricted that right to the
remaining 22 percent (Western Palestine).

The Jews reluctantly accepted this decision. The Arabs didn’t.

In 1946 Transjordan was granted independence by Great Britain.

In 1948 – immediately after the Mandate ended and Jews declared the
State of Israel – Transjordan invaded Western Palestine, conquering
Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem (comprising 4 per cent of Mandatory Palestine)
– and unified these areas with Transjordan to form a new territorial
entity – Jordan – encompassing 82 per cent of Mandatory Palestine completely
devoid of Jews.

The founding Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Charter in 1964
specifically excluded any PLO claim to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

In the 1967 Six Day War Israel captured Judea and Samaria from
Jordan. The PLO – claiming Jordan and Israel to be one indivisible
territorial unit – removed its non-claim to sovereignty from the revised
1968 Charter.

Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty 1994 (Peace Treaty) – which
has withstood many events that could have seen its termination.

That Treaty is again under threat – as Jordan has:

indicated it is not prepared to renew an expired 25-year lease of Jordanian sovereign territory farmed by Israelis and

given the PLO 40% representation on the body charged with
administering the Moslem Holy Sites in Jerusalem – breaching the
Washington Declaration and the Peace Treaty.

Jordan’s resistance to negotiating with Israel on Trump’s plan could
see Trump shelving it and abruptly ending the 2018 five years $1.275
billion America–Jordan Memorandum of Understandingunderpinning Jordan’s security and stability.

The PLO – as in 1970 – is waiting in the wings as current ongoing unrest in Jordan is destabilizing continuing Hashemite rule there.

Abdullah might find that spurning Trump and Israel could see him facing the PLO on his own.

Terror Groups Eyeing Israel's Destruction from inside NGOs

Two stalwarts go sleuthing:

For their findings cliick on image

"The research suggests that antisemitism is the fuel that primes the PSC engine"

To read the research report click on image

'For as long as these antisemites wrap themselves up in the Palestinian flag, too many people are willing to turn a blind eye. Only against Jews is this type of racism openly tolerated. It is flourishing in schools, colleges, universities, unions and in city councils. In fact, so rampant is the disease now, in some settings you can be ostracised if you do not partake in the frenzy yourself. Bashing Jews has becomes a trendy position for the ignorant social justice warrior. "Palestinianism" is a viral "ponzi scheme" and as it spreads, it carries antisemitism in the undergrowth.' David Collier (2017)

'This new rise in antisemitism, which I had thought long dead, was not shaven-headed white imbeciles from the far right. It was Muslims, a large chunk of it.... Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked. From that moment on, it all fell into place.... Time and again the same tropes emerged, the same sort of stuff that Streicher and Goebbels would have commended – and uttered.... And from that a whole bunch of other stuff emerged: the old blood libel business (a favourite of the repulsive Jenny Tonge).... Nice, avuncular, Jeremy Corbyn, with his peace badges, happily laying a wreath at the graveside of Palestinian terrorists who murdered innocent Jewish athletes, oh, and much much more.... It is the same antisemitism, exactly the same: the obsession with Israel to the exclusion of everything else, the conspiracy theory paranoias, the derangement.... Here’s the test – if you cannot see the flagrant racism in the BDS movement, and if you are obsessed with the perfidy of the Middle East’s only democracy to the exclusion of all else, you are an antisemite. That means a good proportion of the Labour Party, including the leader, and almost all of Momentum: no brown shirts, no marching bands, but the same old filth, dressed in the clothes of a polytechnic geography lecturer.'Rod Liddle (2018)

Pro-Israel Down Under

Shalom and Welcome to my blog!I'm the little Aussie blogger who took the screenshot and broke the story of Stephen Sizer's notorious 9/11 post, and I've since broken two other stories that subsequently went viral, one Australia-wide and one, thanks to the sterling work of two other bloggers, worldwide. I remain very surprised and very honoured to have been co-winner, Best Pro-Israel Blog, Hasby Awards, 2013Please "Like" me on Facebook; my Facebook page ishere

'In a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted, Israel ... is different.... Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel's Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights.... Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East. Israel is what is right about the Middle East.' Bibi Netanyahu (20 Iyar 5771; 24 May 2011)Scroll to end for more quotations

Tired of anti-Balfour agitprop?

Click image for link

Balfour and Beyond

Click image for link

Try this for Sizer

Sizer 101. Click image for link

'Before the June 1967 Six Day War, there were no such things as "settlements". Palestinians were trying to destroy and displace Israel anyhow. The core problem is not, and never was, "settlements," but the right of Israel (or any non-Muslim nation) to exist inside any borders in that part of the world.If you take a stand that is based on a lie, then that stand cannot succeed. If you try to oppose antisemitism but pretend it is the same thing as "Islamophobia," then the structure on which you have made your stand will totter and all your aspirations will fail. If you try to make a stand based on the idea that settlement construction rather than the intransigence of the Palestinians to the existence of a Jewish state is what is holding up a peace deal, then facts will keep on intruding.' Douglas Murray (31 December 2016)https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9685/britain-little-lies

BDS is Antisemitic

Click image to learn why

The Bigotry & Immorality of BDS

Click image for link

'Islamophobia does NOT come from the same wellspring of hatred as antisemitism. Antisemitism is a true prejudice because the hatred and demonisation it promotes derive entirely from lies and a repudiation of rationality itself. Islamophobia is a false allegation of prejudice which is deployed to silence rational criticism based on actual facts about attitudes and practices within the Islamic world. [L]ethally compromised even-handedness is to misunderstand, and thus minimise, antisemitic attitudes and behaviour while shutting down legitimate and necessary discussion of the threat from the Islamic world – even to demonise as “Islamophobic” anyone who draws attention to the extent and consequences of Muslim antisemitism.' Melanie Phillips (14 December 2016)

"Selling a house to a Jew is a betrayal of Allah"

To read more click image

Maps of Mendacity & Mischief

Click image to learn why

These misleading maps were deliberately prepared to date from 1946 – intentionally papering over the momentous events that had occurred between 1917 and 1945. Attempts to unravel binding precepts of international law established between 1917 and 1945 – and failing to insist on their being upheld and enforced – has a lot to do with the sorry situation the world finds itself in today.David Singer (2016)

How They Twist the Truth!

Click image for more on the lies

Jews have re-assumed the role of the canary in the mine and are the first to be targeted, but the world would face the same threat if Jews did not exist. Israel has been at the front lines confronting Islamic extremism but has received scant support... For Jews, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. The virulence of the antisemitic hatred closing in on Jews in Europe (and elsewhere) is horrifying... Europe is today facing a crisis as serious as the confrontation with Nazism. If Western leaders continue behaving like Chamberlain and fail to stand up to this global threat, it could usher in a new Dark Age in which the Judeo-Christian culture is subsumed by primitive barbarism. The writing is on the wall Isi Leibler (12 January 2015)

Expose The Lies!

There is a war of lies and deceit on the internet generating unbelievable hate by denigrating and delegitimising the legal rights conferred on the Jewish people by the League of Nations in 1922 and the United Nations in 1945. The idea that there are two narratives on the Arab-Jewish conflict is rubbish. There is only one – the factual truth that details the return of the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in its ancient biblical, ancestral and historic homeland after 3500 years of dispersion with the unanimous endorsement of the nation states then comprising the League of Nations.... Generals can’t fight a war without soldiers. Jews around the world need to join the fight or vacate the internet to the Jew-haters and their lies that repeated often enough eventually become accepted as truth.David Singer (2016)

Exposing Lies

Cliick image for link

The "Apartheid" Slur

The division of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) into three separate areas “A”, “B” and “C” was agreed on by Israel and the PLO pursuant to the Oslo Accords.95% of the West Bank Arabs live in Areas A and B and their daily lives are under the total administration and control of the PLO since the Palestinian Authority was disbanded by Abbas in January 2013. The PLO has total security control in A and shares security control in B with Israel. Israel has total administrative and security control in C.Israel is entitled to and will continue to take responsibility for the security of Jews living in the West Bank.Jews were given the legal right to settle in the West Bank under article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter. They did so for decades until they were driven out in 1947 and not able to return there until 1967.There are Arab roads only in the West Bank that Jews are not allowed to use. Jews are also forbidden from entering Area “A”. Selling land to Jews is forbidden by the PLO under pain of death. The PLO runs the daily lives of 95% of the West Bank Arabs and Hamas runs the daily lives of 100% of the Gazan Arabs. They have been under occupation – and subjugation – by these two evil groups for the last ten years and given no say in their future or any opportunity to elect others to lead them following the disastrous political decisions of their leaders over the past ten years. Hamas and the PLO do not accept the continued existence of a Jewish State and call for its disappearance. The narratives did not begin in 1948 – they began in about 1917. How do you make peace with an enemy that has been obsessed with not recognising any Jewish national rights in former Palestine for the last 100 years?David Singer (2016)

Telling the Truth

Click image for link

The Jews of the Holy Land ... are surrounded by hostile states 650 times their territory and sixty times their population. Yet their last, best hope of ending two millennia of international persecution - the State of Israel - has somehow survived. When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Cross for bravery. Today, Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.Andrew Roberts (historian)

A voice of courage & reason

He knows, y'know

An Aussie demo against BDS

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what’s racism; women can define sexism; Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something as antisemitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong, that they are exaggerating or lying or using it as a decoy tactic – and to then treat them to a long lecture on what anti-Jewish racism really is. Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian, 29 April 2016)

An awkward fact for some!

Socialist thought was tainted from its very origins with the heavy baggage of anti-Jewish stereotypes. Robert Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal:The Left, the Jews, and Israel (2012)

BDS hypocrisy!

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Israel is understandably obsessed with security, but its greatest security lies ultimately not in the Israeli Defence Forces, but in political warfare.... Most of the world is not deeply interested in what happens in Israel, and probably does not want to be deluged with legalistic defences of particular actions. What it wants is a clear, calm, repeated case. It is a case – aimed more at public opinion than at foreign ministries – about freedom, democracy, a Western way of life and the need for the whole of the free world to fight terrorism. Sometimes you hear Israelis say: “It doesn’t matter what we say. The whole world is against us.” You can see why they say it, for they are indeed unfairly treated. But when they say it, they are uttering a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they won’t say what needs saying, no one else will say it for them. Charles Moore (2010)

Once again the armies of the Arab nations are coordinating their military efforts to destroy Israel - whatever they say about wishing merely to regain the lost territories.... [I]f the present Arab offensive had been launched at the pre-1967 frontiers, then the Israelis would indeed have been fighting to avoid annihilation. It seems now that the Israelis were right to maintain the ceasefire lines gained in 1967, and that to do so is the only guarantee of their continued safety.Alan Sillitoe (The Times, 11 October 1973)

A nuclear Iran threatens our existence

Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam... In this deadly game of thrones, there’s no place for America or for Israel, no place for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don’t share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone... [T]he greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons. To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle, but lose the war. We can’t let that happen...[T]he days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over. We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves. We restored our sovereignty in our ancient home. And the soldiers who defend our home have boundless courage. For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves....Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand. But ... I know that America stands with Israel... You stand with Israel, because you know that the story of Israel is not only the story of the Jewish people but of the human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history’s horrors. Bibi Netanyahu (12 Adar 5775; 3 March 2015)

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions, of people, and there is no refugee problem.... [N]o one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees.... Other nations - when they are defeated - survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed.... [A]s it goes with Israel, so it will go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.Eric Hoffer (1968)

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אם תרצו , אין זו אגדה

Most of the present Arab countries were given their freedom after the 1914-18 War, or after the 1939-45 War.... Yet to listen to Arab spokesmen one might think that they had been cheated ... because they have not also got Israel. Israel is only .2 per cent of the land where Arab States have been established. Surely no fair-minded man can begrudge the Jews their own promised land when it is remembered that for every 2 acres that went to make up Israel, 1,000 acres became Arab.... Why is there an Arab refugee problem? The oil-rich countries have the money. There is no shortage of land, and the Israelis have the technical knowledge to show how it could be developed and made fertile. Bring those things together and the problem could be solved. 3rd Earl of Balfour (1968)

January 7, 2015 has already its place in the history of infamy, but also will be the date when the defenders of freedom and democracy will rise and pay tribute to those who died for their freedom and ours. Therefore, we must not forget on which side we are and who are our allies in the defense of the West and its values. Whether we admit it or not, the West is at war with an enemy who will not stop to destroy us...The State of Israel boasts a commandment that, in one of the darkest hours in the fight for liberty Winston Churchill taught: "Never give up". Israel has proven to be a key ally in the fight against Islamism and also an example of how a liberal democracy can resist the jihadist stake and thrive as a Western nation ... Not only France but also all the West should look to Israel to defeat Islamism...friendsofisraelinitiative.org

[I]t’s impossible to believe that an active antisemite wouldn’t – if only opportunistically – seek out somewhere to nestle in the manifold pleats of Israel-bashing, whether in generally diffuse anti-Zionism, or in more specific Boycott and Divestment Campaigns, Israeli Apartheid Weeks, End the Occupation movements and the like....[T]ell me that not a single Jew-hater finds the activity congenial, that criticising Israel can “never” be an expression of Jew-hating, not even when it takes the form of accusing Israeli soldiers of harvesting organs...Howard Jacobson (The Independent, 27 May 2013)

What has happened to the 800,000 Jews who lived for over 2000 years in the Arab lands ...? Where are they in Arab society today? You dare talk of racism when I can point with pride ... to the fact that it is as natural for an Arab to serve in public office in Israel as it is incongruous to think of a Jew serving in any public office in an Arab country, indeed being admitted to many of them. Chaim Herzog (6 Kislev 5736; 10 November 1975)

I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews.... I defend their right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time. And, disgusted by the antisemitism of many Europeans ... I am shamed by this shame that dishonours my country and Europe.Oriana Fallaci

For Western countries to side with those who question Israel's legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel's vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values, rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude. Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is lost and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Jose Maria Aznar

Israel is, for us, a normal and a special country. A normal country, because it is just like any other democracy. A special country, because the Jewish culture, which eventually became the Judeo-Christian culture of the dignity of man, is the conceptual foundation of liberalism and democracy. This is why attacking Israel is tantamount to attacking Europe and the West. This is also why disputing Israel's legitimacy and its right to existence means questioning democracy. And this is why we are Friends of Israel. By defending Israel, we are defending ourselves.Marcello Pera

Israel ... is beset today by a unique combination of threats. It must defend its people from attack while defending its very right to exist. No other nation in the world faces this dual challenge. To deny Israel's right to confront some of the world's most vicious terrorist groups in order to ensure the safety of its citizens is to corrode international norms from within ... The assault on Israel is one part of a more general assault on the West, on democracy, and on the moral and cultural heritage that grew from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome ... Should these efforts succeed, similar efforts will certainly be turned against other western democracies.George Weigel

Apart from America itself, Israel still stands as the world's brightest model of national self-liberation based on ideals of individual responsibility and human freedom. Israel's ability to withstand Arab attempts to destroy it in one of the longest and most lop-sided wars ever fought serves as an indelible testimony to the strength of democratic culture.... We know from the past that the West paid dearly for ignoring Hitler's war against the Jews. One can only hope it will not pay as dearly for having ignored or underestimated for so long the Arab war against Israel and the Jews. Ruth Wisse

The choice before us is not between victory and defeat, but between victory and annihilation. We therefore have not the slightest intention of allowing the re-creation of the conditions of vulnerability in which we found ourselves, abandoned and alone, in the summer of 1967. Diplomat Michael Comay (1970)

I am duty-bound to defend freedom, culture, peaceful coexistence, the civic education of children, and all the principles that the Tablets of the Law have rendered universal. Principles which Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. This means that, since I am a Gentile, a journalist and a leftist, I have a triple moral commitment to Israel. Because, if Israel were to be vanquished, modernity, culture and freedom would also be crushed. Even though the world has failed to wake up to this fact, Israel's struggle is the world's struggle. Pilar Rahola

About Me

I'm a writer/researcher, with many academic books and articles under my own name. Daphne Anson is my blogging alias. Combining the names of two ships, it's a moniker of special significance to me - I'm a naval history buff. I use an alias owing to a perceived need to keep my blogging and professional identities separate. An Aussie, I've long been interested in
politics and foreign affairs, having studied International Relations in the USA and Britain for my first degree, and I also hold a doctorate. I began blogging in response to the exponential rise in antisemitism and hostility to Israel in the wake of the Mavi Marmara affair.
Another reason I use an alias: http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2015/08/alias-two-ships-daphne-anson.html

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The spiritual awakening which Jews experienced almost without exception last June must not be allowed to become a sealed and finished episode.... Support must be rallied among men of goodwill and their governments if we are to reach that secure and just peace in the attainment of which Israel has never ceased to believe. President Zalman Shazar (1968)

Our judicial system is one of the best in the whole world. Our democracy is the only one in the Middle East.... Just imagine, what would have happened if the Arabs had, like us, accepted the Partition resolution? There would be a Palestinian State living side by side in peace, security, and, I can add, prosperity with the State of Israel, 62 years later. [C]ome to Israel, and realize how small Israel is and what a wonderful place it is. Diplomat Gabriella Shalev (2010)

Israel's Arab citizens are the only Arabs in the Middle East who enjoy genuine civic and religious rights. Religious freedom is protected in Israel as nowhere else, tragically, in the Middle East. And civil rights, of course, there's a supreme court judge who is an Arab, ministers including in my government who are Arabs, Druze, and members of parliament who are Arabs and so on. I would like to see more involvement of Arabs in civil life.Bibi Netanyahu on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show (5 Nov. 2017)